Brattle Principal Pinar Bagci has authored the United Kingdom chapter of Global Competition Review’s (GCR) 2017 edition of the Handbook of Competition Economics. The handbook identifies the primary issues that antitrust economists are tackling today and provides contact details for competition agencies’ economists in 79 jurisdictions around the world.

In her chapter on the UK, Dr. Bagci provides an overview of the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) two significant investigations concluded in the past year in the country’s energy and retail banking markets, which examined concerns over lack of fair competition and pricing in the respective market structures.

Dr. Bagci highlights that the key finding of both CMA investigations relates to consumer behavior, and the apparent reluctance to research and switch energy providers or retail banks due to the belief that small to moderate financial gain is an insufficient reason to switch. She suggests that while the question of financial gain in switching in the CMA investigations is significant, the investigations were perhaps overly simplistic by purely reflecting pricing and failing to include factors such as reputation, trust, and innovation, all of which are also highly relevant in consumers’ decisions to switch providers.